they got poorer last year compared with the year before."The Government plans to stress its help for working families during the election campaign. Household incomes have fallen for the first time since the recession of the early 1990s. There will also be a screening of The Black Tulip (1921), based on the Dumas classic, and two silent versions of Hamlet: a German one of 1920, in which the Prince of Denmark is played by the great Danish actress Asta Nielsen; and the Italian Amleto (1917). Other curiosities include a European film from the director of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz. The Golden Butterfly (1926), based on a P G Wodehouse story, is about the rise and fall of a dancer, played by the French star Lili Damita; and Call of the Blood (1920), is about a British man who, while on holiday with his wife in Sicily, deceives her, with tragic consequences.

Ivor Novello made his film debut as the adulterer.There will also be screenings of Mitchell & Kenyon Edwardian documentaries, and rare European travelogues All the films will have live musical accompaniment. British Silent Cinema Festival, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham (0115 952 6611; ), 7-10 April. Burlesque is back, it seems. A show called Burlesque, starring Immodesty Blaize, opens next month in London. The current doyenne of the ecdysiasts, the awesomely built Dita Von Teese, is writing a book on her technique, and Oxford University Press has published a history of the striptease Non-professionals are also having a go.

Schools for stripping tout the technique as a way of subverting the power dynamic, and learning to love your body Burlesque is back, it seems. The knowingness and irony of present-day burlesque have nothing to do with the real entertainment of that name, which was wholesome, American and proletarian. For most of its existence, stripping, now synonymous with burlesque, did not figure.In the mid-19th century, the term meant what it still does in refined quarters: a satire of manners, music, drama or poetry. But, when Lydia Thompson's British Blondes descended on New York in 1868, the emphasis shifted from literature to legs.